You want a better job, you want promotion, you want a better life. The path to improvement begins with learning new skills and knowledge and these free apps for Android phones can help.
Learning is not just for children and teenagers, it is for life and you should never give up learning new skills and gaining new knowledge. That job, skill or even hobby, you always wanted could be yours and all you need to do is to put your mind to it and apply some effort.
With the right courses and teachers, you could benefit in many ways by learning new skills and knowledge, but where do you find them and can you afford them? It is actually easier and cheaper than you might think and all you need is a phone and a free app or two.
Here are five free apps for Android phones (some are available for iPhones too, so search the App Store for them), that will improve your education and teach you new things you always wanted to know. They could improve your job prospects and make you more employable. Install them now and begin your journet to a better you.
Cursa – free courses with certificate
Price: Free | By: Medeiros Tecnologia | Size: 14 MB | Android: 4.4 and up
Cursa is a free Android app that provides access to many courses and they are organized into categories like Basic Studies, Information Technology, Languages, Career Opportunities, Management and Business, Health and more.
Select a category on the home screen and there may be several sub-categories to choose from so you can dig down to the topic you are most interested in. In categories and sub-categories, one or more courses are displayed.
Most courses consist of collections of videos that are organized into a series of lessons. The length of each lesson varies from a couple of minutes to almost an hour and you watch them in order as and when you have the time. The app remembers which courses you have started and which lesson is up next, so you can easily continue from last time.
Some courses are text-based and the ones I looked at looked like PDFs of books. I found them awkward to read on a small phone screen.
The video courses are taken from YouTube and the Cursa app basically organizes them, makes them easy to browse, and tracks your progress through the lessons. It is easier than using the YouTube app. However, I found the app interface a bit odd and confusing at times. It could be better.
Study reminders can be set, certificates can be created after completing courses and the app does a pretty good job of turning YouTube videos into useful courses. You can learn a lot with Cursa and it is a useful educational app to have on your phone.
CourseGuru
Price: Free | By: IKAMM Apps | Size: 4.4 MB | Android: 4.03 and up
CourseGuru is a free app for Android that provides access to free courses covering a wide range of topics. There are 23 categories on the home screen of the app and some of them contain as many as 100 courses, although some have as few as three or four.
The total number of courses is in the hundreds and they have an academic and science bias with categories like chemistry, civil engineering, mathematics, psychology, aerospace and astronomy, and similar categories.
Open a category and you can browse the courses. The display is nicely designed and there is a thumbnail image, course title, brief course content details, and a star rating.
Courses are produced by US universities like Harvard, Yale, MIT, and others, and they consist of video lectures. One course I looked at had 50 videos with a total running time of 6 hours. This is heavyweight stuff and sometimes technically advanced.
CourseGuru is a bit like taking a university course on your phone at home in your spare time. They are not for casual learning, but if you want to learn something specific, like Java programming, macro economics, edpidemology and control of infectious diseases, building materials and construction, and hundreds of other topics, this app is brilliant.
As with Cursa, the CourseGuru app is basically a front end for YouTube and it makes it much easier to find and watch educational video courses. It lists course contents as a series of modules, it tracks your progress as you work your way through them, and makes it easy to see where you are up to and continue where you left off last time.
edX
Price: Free | By: edX | Size: 14 MB | Android: 4.4 and up
edX: Online Courses by Harvard, Imperial, MIT, IBM is a very popular free app with over one million installs and 53,000 ratings on the Google Play Store. It claims to have over 20 million learners and over 2,000 courses. This is clearly an app you should take a close look at if you want to improve your skills and education.
As the full name of the app indicates, many courses are provided by top universities around the world and some of the courses are quite technical and advanced. However, the quality is excellent and the content is comprehensive.
There are too many topics to list, but here is just a few of them: Business and management, computer science, humanities, language, biology and life sciences, economics and finance, history, literature and many more. The huge range of choice is a bit overwhelming at first and there is a temptation to sign up to too many.
Select a course and the details are displayed, which includes a brief description, length in weeks and how many hours per week you need to study, the academic difficulty level and the institution providing the course. It is all a bit more formal than the casual learning of Cursa and CourseGuru, which may be an advantage by encouraging you to study and take the course more seriously.
This is a fantastic app with superb content. It is like home-based, phone-based university study. Get the app!
Smartly Business Courses
Price: Free | By: Pedago | Size: 28 MB | Android: 4.4 and up
Smartly Business Courses is a free Android app that is focused on business as you probably guessed from the name and this sets it apart from some of the other learning apps. Most of the courses available are free, which makes you wonder how it makes money. Companies pay them when they recruit their candidates.
As well as a learning app, it is a job network and you can sign up for The Free MBA (Master of Business Administration), The Executive MBA, a free Fundamentals of Business certificate, or Career Network Only, which is job opportunities. Skip these main offers and you have access to more courses like Business Foundations, Accounting 1: Fundamentals and more.
The range and number of courses is nowhere near what is available in other apps and Smartly is highly focused on improving your business skills, nothing else. It is good for anyone looking for business courses.
Free Courses Online. TubeStudy
Price: Free | By: CuSeJu | Size: 31 MB | Android: 5.0 and up
There is a lot of educational content on YouTube and there are tutorials, lessons and even whole courses. Like some of the other apps here, Free Courses Online. TubeStudy simply presents YouTube content in a more easily accessible and digestible way.
All the courses in the app are free on YouTube, but unless you know exactly what you are looking for, they are hard to find. TubeStudy makes it much easier.
There is a Selected section that highlights a few courses you might be interested in, but the main way to find courses is to use the search feature. Courses are organized into categories like food, musical instruments, art, graphic design, languages, web design, office and more.
Open a category and a list of courses is displayed with a thumbnail image, title, course supplier and number of lessons. Some courses contain as few as six lessons, but some contain more than 100 lessons and one I saw had 240 lessons!
As this is YouTube content, the quality varies, but generally it is pretty good. For casual learning, the courses are good and you can learn a lot by working through them at your own pace as and when you have the time.
